Sunday, March 28, 2010

I've had a few requests from people wanting to teach themselves applications of Category Theory to Haskell based on posts I've made. I've made things difficult by posting stuff at random levels of difficulty and without any kind of organising thread through them. So here's an attempt to list a bunch of posts related to aspects of category theory. I've grouped them by themes and within each theme I've tried to list the articles in order of difficulty. Unfortunately there can be big gaps between one article and the next as none of this material was intended to be linked together continuously. Nonetheless, I hope this is of some help.

MonadsThe first theme has to be monads of course. But don't forget: monads don't do anything. They're simply an interface to something that you must already have implemented some other way. So don't believe all that hype about how monads are what allow Haskell to use side effects and I/O.

Fold and UnfoldI think this is one of the great applications of Category Theory to Computer Science. Structural recursion can be characterised really nicely in terms of F-algebras. That's cool. But even cooler is that when you dualise the definitions you get a great way to look at non-terminating computations on things like streams.